Thinking-Free Policy Initialization Makes Distilled Reasoning Models More Effective and Efficient Reasoners

🤗 Upvotes: 26 | cs.LG, cs.CL Authors: Xin Xu, Cliveb AI, Kai Yang, Tianhao Chen, Yang Wang, Saiyong Yang, Can Yang Title: Thinking-Free Policy Initialization Makes Distilled Reasoning Models More Effective and Efficient Reasoners Arxiv: http://arxiv.org/abs/2509.26226v1 Abstract: Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Reward (RLVR) effectively solves complex tasks but demands extremely long context lengths during training, leading to substantial computational costs. While multi-stage training can partially mitigate this, starting with overly short contexts often causes irreversible performance degradation, ultimately failing to reduce overall training compute significantly. In this paper, we introduce **T**hinking-**F**ree **P**olicy **I**nitialization (**TFPI**), a simple yet effective adaptation to RLVR that bridges long Chain-of-Thought (CoT) distillation and standard RLVR. TFPI employs a simple *ThinkFree* operation, explicitly discarding the thinking content via a direct ** append, to reduce token usage during inference. Training with *ThinkFree*-adapted inputs improves performance and lowers token consumption, even in the original slow-thinking mode. Extensive experiments across various benchmarks have shown that TFPI accelerates RL convergence, achieves a higher performance ceiling, and yields more token-efficient reasoning models without specialized rewards or complex training designs. With TFPI only, we train a 4B model to reach 89.0% accuracy on AIME24 and 65.5% on LiveCodeBench using less than 4K H20 hours.